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Hey, Legends.
Cross Progression has now been rolled out to all Apex Legends players. Thank you for your patience as we completed this in waves in order to maintain stability and address issues that surfaced. For those who love the inside scoop, read on to learn more about the process and details on one of our latest features from our dev team.
For more information, or if you still have questions about cross progression, please visit our dedicated blog, FAQ, and support hub from earlier this season.
UPDATE: Thanks for your questions and feedback. If you're looking for account help re: Cross Progression, please create a thread via Answers HQ with as much info as possible so that support can assist.
Now that Cross Progression is available for all Apex Legends players, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on how the rollout went, provide some insight into the approach, discuss some of the issues we encountered, and also highlight some planned Cross Progression related updates.
Firstly, on behalf of the Apex Legends dev team we want to say a big thank you to you, our community, for your passion, feedback, and - most appreciatively - patience for this feature. Cross Progression is something we’ve been working on for some time and we are extremely happy to finally see it available to the community. The rollout wasn’t without its challenges, but went relatively smoothly.
ROLLOUT
Why did we roll it out like we did - over the month of November and not with a big bang day-one approach? In a word: safety.
Cross progression requires a lot of things to happen in the background. It was crucial to us that everyone’s gaming experience was stable while we introduced the feature. To ensure this, we decided a gradual rollout was the best approach.
As players went through the process, we monitored the health of the game and made sure reliability was maintained. As called out before, Cross Progression is mandatory. This means every player who has ever played Apex Legends must be cross-progressed and that is a lot of processing! Trying to drop this all at once on a season’s launch day would come with too much risk, which is why we opted to start a rollout with launch instead. This approach also gave us the opportunity to detect potential issues, pause, make any necessary changes, and continue with renewed confidence. And pause we did.
Early in the process we detected a rare issue where some multi-platform users did not receive the correct platform as their primary platform post Cross Progression merge. Out of an abundance of caution and to not impact other users who could potentially experience this bug, we initiated a pause so that we could focus on a fix before continuing. We quickly released a change and continued the rollout.
Over the course of the following four weeks, millions of players went through the process. And on November 28th, everyone who had ever logged in to Apex Legends was eligible to receive Cross Progression.
So, a complete success, right? Almost. Cross Progression is complex and, apart from the aforementioned incorrect primary account selection edge case, we encountered a number of other issues we have either addressed or are continuing to work on.
ISSUES AND FIXES
Let’s talk about unlinking and relinking. We communicated on the run up to and during Cross Progression’s rollout that unlinking and relinking platforms with your EA ID had no bearing on receiving Cross Progression. Rather, doing so would impact progress (stats) and relinking a platform back to the same EA ID would not guarantee restoring access to old content.
Unfortunately, we still saw a spike in players unlinking and relinking which contributed to our first issue. In the process of unlinking and then being Cross Progressed, a small number of players’ accounts experienced a Data Mismatch issue. Note: relinking and unlinking isn’t the sole source of this Data Mismatch error but we know it can happen when players perform this action.
The volume of players impacted by this is relatively low, but we have been actively working to resolve these mismatches over the last few weeks. We have also been looking into players impacted by other edge case issues as we appreciate that being part of something less widespread doesn’t make the fact you have an issue any better. Please know that we are still working hard on resolving any and all of these.
There were also some other kinks that we quickly addressed. For instance, some players hadn’t played on their non-primary platform accounts in some time putting them into an inactive state; with Apex Legends having moved on since they were last active. The result was that these very few players were ineligible for Cross Progression until we pushed a fix in late November.
MISSING CONTENT
As a reminder, some badges earned on a non-primary account may not be included as part of the merge process. There are reasons behind this that go outside the scope of this post, but this was always something that we were aware of and communicated in our blog and FAQs.
That said, we are exploring ways to return specific badges that players unlocked on accounts that were merged as part of Cross Progression—this does not include these specific badges. Our work is still ongoing with these badges so we don’t have a set list to share yet, but we can say we know which badges the community is vocal about having lost and we are investing time and effort into restoring what’s possible.
We are also aware of some players flagging missing heirlooms, coins, and other content. Our Support team diligently investigates each and every one of these support tickets. Typically (not always), this is due to players believing a non-primary account was linked, but there was another EA ID account in play. Hence, the content wasn’t merged as it was not eligible.
Cross Progression does not include merging accounts associated with multiple EA IDs and there are no plans to change this. Rest assured that the other account still has the associated content (and is also Cross Progressed). It just has not and will not be merged with another EA ID account, even if both EA IDs are owned by the same person.
You may have noticed that we said “not always” above in relation to missing content. Thanks to players contacting support, we have identified certain rare circumstances where players’ non-primary accounts were not included in their merge process. This happens on accounts that have either no or very low progress, but still has associated content. This content still counts! And we didn’t include it when we should have. We’re now in the process of updating the associated merged accounts of these players with this missing content, and will communicate once we have completed this process in 2024.
Note: there is also a chance you created a non-primary account after October 26th, linked it to your EA ID, and then unlocked content/added funds to it. As called out in our blog post, these accounts are ineligible for Cross Progression.
GENERAL QUESTIONS
We also want to touch on some comments regarding Cross Progression in general. For example, something we saw called out was that players got the “Cross Progression Is Here” screen but felt like they weren’t cross-progressed. If you saw this screen, rest assured, you got Cross Progression.
If you didn’t see a pop-up screen this means your account only had one platform linked at the time that it was cross progressed. With Cross Progression complete, this account can now be used across platforms where you will retain your content and progress.
However, it's important to note that Cross Progression was an event that has now been completed. Linking an account to an already cross-progressed account does not add this account to your cross progression profile. In fact, the process of unlinking and relinking accounts can have adverse effects as mentioned here and in our past communications.
This also calls back to the previously discussed situation where some players expected a merge because they believed their platforms were all linked to the same EA ID. If you didn’t see the merge screen, then your platforms were not linked and hence a merge didn’t happen.
We hope the above provided some insight into Cross Progression and its journey so far. That journey isn’t over—there are badges to return and remote edge-cases to iron out. We continue to monitor and, as necessary, we will make updates and changes to ensure Cross Progression delivers on its promise.
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